The Guardian

We have only to turn on the TV or look at social media to see the suffering climate change already causes

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For the last few months, children such as myself have only had to turn on our TVs to see images of people stranded on their roofs hoping to be rescued by the State Emergency Service. Opening the Instagram app reveals how the Great Barrier Reef has just suffered its sixth mass coral bleaching. And “once in a hundred year” floods seem to happen just a bit too often.

For some of us, it hits home on a personal level too.

Scott Morrison says Labor wants to use government safeguard mechanism as a ‘sneaky carbon tax’ but it is already making big business pay for offsets

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The Coalition last year required polluting businesses to buy 419,000 carbon credits at an estimated cost of $15m using a policy that Scott Morrison now falsely describes as “Labor’s sneaky carbon tax”.

Government data released last month shows that, under the Coalition’s so-called safeguard mechanism, major polluting companies had to buy 70% more carbon credits last financial year than in 2019-20.

Federal judge says farmers had been blindsided by a government order to shut down

Canada’s effort to phase out open-pen salmon farms has hit a roadblock after a federal judge said farmers had been blindsided by a government order to shut down.

Federal court judge Elizabeth Heneghan ruled earlier this month that former fisheries minister Bernadette Jordan had failed to grant farm operators the right to procedural fairness when she announced plans to phase out the farms, and criticized the minister’s lack of clarity surrounding the controversial decision that companies said would cost them millions in losses.

Largest analysis to date on the state of the world’s reptiles warns of threat to ecosystems as more than 1,800 species fight to survive

More than a fifth of all reptile species are threatened with extinction, which could have a “devastating” impact on the planet, a new study warns.

The largest ever analysis of the state of the world’s reptiles, published in Nature, found that 21% of reptile species are facing extinction. From lizards to snakes, such a loss could have disastrous impacts on ecosystems around the world, the study says.

Rising damage, caused mostly by food production, puts ability to feed planet’s growing population at risk

Human damage to the planet’s land is accelerating, with up to 40% now classed as degraded, while half of the world’s people are suffering the impacts, UN data has shown.

The world’s ability to feed a growing population is being put at risk by the rising damage, most of which is caused by food production. Women in the developing world are particularly badly affected as they often lack legal titles to land and can be thrown off it if conditions are tough.

Global heating has left millions at risk of starvation, and reliant on relatives who have made the journey to Europe

Somalis call the dangerous journey towards Europe “going on tahriib” a word mostly associated with illegal activities such as trafficking or smuggling. Those who attempt it travel by road through Ethiopia, Sudan and Libya, then by boat across the Mediterranean to Europe – if they’re lucky enough to make it that far.

Their families often pay thousands of pounds to unscrupulous smugglers, who may break their initial promises, upping the prices or abandoning victims too early. Yet people still try. And increasingly, climate change is one of the reasons.

Sally Hayden is a journalist and the author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route

National Audit Office says tax has increased amount of money criminals can make from waste crime

Organised criminals have accidentally been given incentives by the government to fly-tip, a damning report by the National Audit Office has found.

Fly-tipping has increased year-on-year in England since 2012-13 and reached 1.13 million recorded incidents in 2020-21 – at a cost of £11.6m to clear large-scale incidents.

Scientists believe the reptiles have shifted from marine prey towards land-based food sources in the Territory, helping to boost numbers

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The exponential increase in saltwater crocodile populations in the Northern Territory in recent decades may be partly a result of them preying on feral pigs, new research suggests.

Scientists who have analysed the diets of saltwater crocodiles in the Territory believe the reptiles have shifted from marine prey to predominantly terrestrial food sources in the last 50 years – driven specifically by an abundance of feral pigs.

Retired GP Diana Warner, accused of obstructing M25, joined by two others in the act of ‘civil resistance’

Three members of Insulate Britain have disrupted a magistrates court trial, gluing their hands to court furniture and paying tribute to the environmental activist who died after setting himself on fire outside the US supreme court.

Dr Diana Warner, a retired GP from Bristol, had been due to face trial at Stratford magistrates court on a charge of causing a public nuisance by obstructing junction 14 of the M25 on 27 September last year.

NFU and Green Alliance at loggerheads over timing of post-Brexit Environmental Land Management schemes

There will be a “substantial gap” in UK agriculture’s efforts to reach net zero if post-Brexit environment-friendly subsidies are delayed by another two years, according to new analysis.

The National Farmer’s Union (NFU) is urging the government to delay Environmental Land Management schemes (Elms) until 2025 and keep the EU’s Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) in the interim period, which pays farmers for the amount of land they own, regardless of its impact on the environment.

Calls for international standard on extraction and better monitoring of most-exploited resource after water

Humans extract 50bn tonnes of sand and gravel every year, according to UN research, enough to build a wall 27 metres high by 27 metres wide around the planet.

Sand is the most-exploited resource after water. But unlike water, it is not recognised as a key strategic resource by governments and industry, something, the UN says, that must change and fast.

The UN report makes the case for greater monitoring of extraction and supply chains, measures to compensate for the associated loss of animal and plant species as well as the uneven social and economic impacts of sand mining.

With Australia’s lived experience of global heating, you would think we’d have moved past grown men staging hyperbolic encounters with invisible things

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If you’ve been paying attention over the past decade or so, you may have noticed that opponents of climate action in Australia spend a lot of time talking about things that don’t exist. Tony Abbott pioneered this technique by winning an election promising to repeal a carbon tax that never actually existed.

Abbott’s former chief of staff, Peta Credlin, is leading the authority on this point. Over to you, Peta. “It wasn’t a carbon tax, as you know. It was many other things in nomenclature terms but we made it a carbon tax,” Credlin said in February 2017.

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The UN’s annual report on mitigating calamities shows that a radical rethink is needed to protect those who suffer most

If the world seems beset by constant disasters, from the pandemic to drought, we only have ourselves to blame.

Over the past two decades, we have experienced up to 500 disasters a year as a result of human activity. By 2030, this could rise to 560 a year – or 107 a week.

Number of new plants planned fell last year, but coal-generated electricity rose by 9% to record high

The number of coal-fired power plants under development around the world fell last year, but far too much coal is still being burned and too many new coal-fired power plants are planned for the world to stay within safe temperature limits.

Coal use appeared to be in long-term decline before the Covid-19 pandemic, but lockdowns around the world and economic upheaval drove an increase in new coal projects in 2020, particularly in China.

Policy drift has consequences. Problems become larger. Future generations are left with the mess

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Australian voters who chose their preferred candidate before the election was called have saved time. The campaign’s policy vacuum has hardly informed voting choices, with both major parties eschewing what the former US president George Bush Sr termed the “vision thing”.

Whether or not politicians, irrespective of ideological colour, have the stomach for them, important and urgent economic challenges lie ahead.

Group’s description disputed by scientists, with seals recognised as important part of food chain

Seals are the “rats of the sea” and should be culled, a group of Cornish fishers have said.

Marine campaign groups hit back after fishers on an online marketplace and forum expressed anger about the amount of fish seals eat.

Up to 12,000 substances could fall within the scope of the new ‘restrictions roadmap’

Thousands of potentially harmful chemicals could soon be prohibited in Europe under new restrictions, which campaigners have hailed as the strongest yet.

Earlier this year, scientists said chemical pollution had crossed a “planetary boundary” beyond which lies the breakdown of global ecosystems.

Warnings of dramatically escalating extinctions in Australia over the next two decades seem to be falling on deaf ears

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Gregory Andrews was Australia’s first threatened species commissioner, appointed in 2013 by the then incoming Coalition environment minister Greg Hunt. He recently returned to the country, after serving as high commissioner to Ghana, and was disheartened by what he found.

Andrews believes the state of the country’s natural wildlife and biodiversity is the “worst it’s ever been” and calls the ongoing destruction of forests and other habitat “crazy”.

Experts say Wales has huge potential for generating renewable marine power, yet, so far, ambitious schemes have been ignored

On the stunning and craggy coastline of Holy Island in north Wales, work has started on a construction project to generate energy from one of the world’s greatest untapped energy resources: tidal power.

The Morlais project, on the small island off the west of Anglesey has benefited from £31m in what is likely to be the last large grant for Wales from the European Union’s regional funding programme. It will install turbines at what will be one of the largest tidal stream energy sites in the world, covering 13 square miles of the seabed.

The environment ranks low in polls of the public’s fears, while sickness ranks top. Yet we will all get more ill as the planet heats

Arnold Schwarzenegger has the answer to tackling the climate emergency. Don’t hype the economic damage, he says, just say we need to “terminate pollution”.

It may seem odd to pick the former bodybuilder and actor turned Republican politician as someone with the answer to the most important issue of the 21st century. But Schwarzenegger’s focus on pollution as California’s governor, and that of his successor, the Democrat Jerry Brown, means that since 2008, by wide agreement, the Golden State has enjoyed the longest economic expansion in its history, while also cutting emissions.